Mood-congruent memory in daily life: Evidence from interactive ambulatory monitoring

• Physiological arousal at encoding facilitated recall of negative words in negative situations.
• Low physiological arousal facilitated the recall of positive words in positive contexts.
• Physiological arousal measures are needed to identify mood congruent memory effects.
• Experimentation with ambulatory technique helps to assess emotional memory in real life settings.

Evidence from the psychological laboratory indicates that emotional states tend to facilitate the encoding and retrieval of stimuli of the same emotional valence. To explore mood-congruent memory and the role of arousal in daily life, we applied a new interactive ambulatory technique. Psychophysiological arousal as indexed by non-metabolic heart rate, self-reported emotions and situational information were assessed during 24-h recordings in 70 healthy participants. The emotional state was used to trigger word list presentations on a minicomputer. Our results show that psychophysiological arousal at the time of encoding enhanced the recall of negative words in negative emotional conditions, whereas low psychophysiological arousal facilitated recall of positive words. In positive contexts, mood congruency was more prominent when arousal was low. These results demonstrate how automated experimentation with an ambulatory technique may help to assess emotional memory in real-world contexts, thus providing new methods for diverse fields of application.